Cheryl Donegan (born 1962) is an American

conceptual art Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called inst ...

ist."LECTURE, PERFORMANCE, AND DISCUSSION: CHERYL DONEGAN"
, at

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is a not-for-profit institution in the Museum District, Houston, Texas, founded in 1948, dedicated to presenting contemporary art to the public. As a non-collecting museum, it strives to provide a forum for visual ...

website (retrieved January 24, 2014)"Cheryl Donegan"
at the

Artnet Artnet.com is an art market website. It is operated by Artnet Worldwide Corporation, which has headquarters in New York City, in the United States, and is owned by Artnet AG, a German publicly traded company based in Berlin that is listed on ...

She is known for her video works, such as ''Head'' (1993) and ''Kiss My Royal Irish Ass'' (1992), which targeted the cliches of the female body in art and other issues of art politics.

Early life and career

Cheryl Donegan was born in 1962 in

New Haven, Connecticut New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134,023 ...

. She graduated from

Rhode Island School of Design The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD , pronounced "Riz-D") is a private art and design school in Providence, Rhode Island. The school was founded as a coeducational institution in 1877 by Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf, who sought to increase the ...

with a B.F.A. in painting, and from

Hunter College Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also adm ...

with a M.F.A.

Works

Donegan's ''Gag'' (1993) is a piece in which the artist eats a baguette placed between her legs while her hands are bound behind her. Chris Darke described it as a sketch for ''Head'' (1994). The ''Kiss My Royal Irish Ass'' video shows her mass-producing paintings of

shamrock A shamrock is a young sprig, used as a symbol of Ireland. Saint Patrick, Ireland's patron saint, is said to have used it as a metaphor for the Christian Holy Trinity. The name ''shamrock'' comes from Irish (), which is the diminutive o ...

by dipping her buttocks into paint and pressing them to paper. "Cheryl Donegan at Basilico Fine Arts"
by Robert Mahoney (retrieved January 24, 2014) The video ''Head'' shows a woman lapping a stream of milk from a plastic container. This work is perceived as a kick at pornographic images of domination and sexual slavery.

Collier Schorr Collier Schorr (born 1963) is an American artist and fashion photographer best known for adolescent portraits that blend photographic realism with elements of fiction and youthful fantasy. Schorr grew up in Queens, New York and studied journalism ...

"Cheryl Donegan"
''

Artforum International ''Artforum'' is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ x 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notably ...

'', Vol. 31, No. 10 (retrieved January 24, 2014) ''Head'' is in the collection of

the Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of th ...

, New York The video ''Tent'' (1995) shows her erotically undressed painting self-portraits on three large canvasses.

''Head''

''Head'' is a short video where Cheryl Donegan catches milk in her mouth as it spurts from a plastic container. In the video, a woman (the artist) enters the frame and unplugs a spout in the side of a green, plastic milk container. The bottle spurts a milk-like liquid from its side, and the woman catches the stream in her mouth as Sugar's "A Good Idea" plays in the background. The woman is wearing a

leotard A leotard () is a unisex skin-tight one-piece garment that covers the torso from the crotch to the shoulder. The garment was made famous by the French acrobatic performer Jules Léotard (1838–1870). There are sleeveless, short-sleeved, and ...

and

lip gloss Lip gloss is a cosmetic used primarily to give lips a glossy luster, and sometimes to add a subtle color. It is distributed as a fluid or a soft solid (not to be confused with lip balm, which generally has medical or soothing purposes, or lips ...

, and her head and upper body show in the frame. As her mouth fills, she spits or dribbles the liquid back into the top of the container, or swallows the liquid. As the stream's gush dwindles, she begins to lick the hole and the bottle. In ''Light Readings'', Chris Darke describes ''Head'' as "an exemplary piece of post-MTV neo-porn" that had incorporated both traditional and contemporary elements: the "traditional" single-take shot reminiscent of 1970s video performance, and the "contemporary" "tension-and-release" model of the "pop-promo format". Darke wrote that Donegan's 1993 ''Gag'', where she eats a baguette placed between her legs, functions as a sketch for ''Head''. Collier Schorr wrote for ''

'' that she had a single thought upon seeing the piece: "... this girl must be one hell of a ride." She added that ''Head'' provoked such boldness as "pumped-up visions of domination and sexual slavery", and related the woman in the video to femme fatale tropes of women with

sexual appetite Libido (; colloquial: sex drive) is a person's overall sexual drive or desire for Human sexual activity, sexual activity. Libido is influenced by biological, psychological, and social factors. Biologically, the sex hormones and associated neurotr ...

s perceived as dangerous. Schorr described the video as "direct" and a study of the depiction of pleasure, writing that it makes viewers recall their "pornographic histories" of "women crouched waiting to receive" with "insatiable hunger".

Reception

Oxford Art Online Oxford Art Online is an Oxford University Press online gateway into art research, which was launched in 2008. It provides access to several online art reference works, including Grove Art Online (originally published in 1996 in a print version, ''T ...

'' cited Donegan among

Maureen Connor Maureen Connor (born 1947) is an American artist who creates installations and videos dealing with human resources and social justice. She is known internationally for her work from the 1980s to the present, which focuses on gender and its modes ...

and

Dorit Cypis Dorit Cypis (born 1951, Tel Aviv) is a Canadian-American artist, mediator and educator based in Los Angeles.Johnson, Reed"‘Rethinking Borders’: Urging both sides to an understanding,"''Los Angeles Times'', November 7, 2011. Retrieved October ...

as revitalizing the feminist video art of the 1970s. They said her work capitalized on how the video medium distances the physical body from other subjects (the

self The self is an individual as the object of that individual’s own reflective consciousness. Since the ''self'' is a reference by a subject to the same subject, this reference is necessarily subjective. The sense of having a self—or ''selfhood ...

, the viewer), as a metaphor for "alienation in cyberculture". That alienation also intends to weaken ideals of femininity. In ''Light Readings'', Chris Darke associated Donegan with a "new generation" of performance and video artists whose work uses the "formal strategies" of 1970s video performances (e.g., "low-tech", "single-take" videos about "process, duration, and repetition" from artists like

Bruce Nauman Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941) is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico. Life and work ...

and

Vito Acconci Vito Acconci (, ; January 24, 1940 – April 27, 2017) was an influential American performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His foundational ...

). Darke wrote that Donegan combined these forms with more contemporaneous cultural forms, like MTV and pornography, in an "ironic" fashion. Darke noted the recurrence of "banal objects" throughout her work, such as plastic jugs and "plastic sheeting". The critic wrote that some of Donegan's work, such as ''Kiss My Royal Irish Ass'' (1992), ''Clarity'' (1994), and ''Rehearsal'' (1994), departed from the "defiantly throwaway character" of her other work and instead engaged with the art-making process and art history.

Exhibitions

Donegan's work has been exhibited in many major institutions around the country and abroad. Following the inclusion of her work in
NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star
', she was recently the subject of a midcareer survey,
Scenes and Commercials
', at the New Museum, New York. Her work has also been exhibited a
White Flag Projects
St. Louis, th

th
Museum of Modern Art
th
Tang Teaching Museum of Art
New York Film and Video Festival, the 1993 Venice Biennale, and the Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, France. Cheryl Donegan is represented by
Levy.Delval Gallery
' in Brussels and David Shelton Gallery in Houston. Recent shows include: 2017: Aspen Museum, CO, USA; My Plastic Bag, Kunsthalle Zurich, CH; David Shelton Gallery, Houston, TX. 2016: High Line, NY, curated by Melanie Kress; Cheryl Donegan: Scenes + Commercials, New Museum, NY. 2015: Banners, Layers, Legs & Vines, Levy. Delval, Brussels, BE; The Softest Punk, HorseAndPony, Berlin, DE; Sgorbati Projects, New York, NY. 2014: Haul, David Shelton Gallery, Houston, TX. 2013: Blood Sugar, Galerie VidalCuglietta, Brussels, BE.

Awards

Donegan was the winner of the Grand Prix, 7th Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement,

Centre pour l’image contemporaine The Centre pour l'Image Contemporaine or CIC was a contemporary art exhibition centre in Geneva, Switzerland. CIC was established in 1985 to organize events and exhibitions of images using new technologies such as video, multimedia, and the Interne ...

Saint-Gervais (Geneva) Saint-Gervais may refer to the following places: France * Saint-Gervais, former commune of the Aveyron department, now part of Saint-Symphorien-de-Thénières * Saint-Gervais, former commune of the Charente department, now part of Nanteuil-en-Val ...